


Bloody Brilliant

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Series: Whumptober 2019 [5]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Because that's how Dev talks and also his new friend is a potty mouth, Blood, Dev Whump, Gen, Home Invasion, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Relationships, Rated for Profanity, Screw toxic masculinity, Stabbing, Stitches, Vomiting, We cuddle like men, Whump, Whumptober, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 14:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20950142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: Dev swore to himself as he fumbled with his keys. The steady hands he had relied on for twenty-six hours and counting had vanished, leaving him picking through his key ring for the fob Wayne had left for him. That the fob was meant for the alarm system he hadn’t bothered to activate didn’t register, and his irritation had only grown by the time he located first the fob and then the brass key that unlocked his front door.





	Bloody Brilliant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [audreycritter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Foreign Object](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7804285) by [audreycritter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter). 

> Dr. Kiran Devabhaktuni is the creation of audreycritter and the light of my life. You should absolutely 100% read the entirety of Cor Et Cerebrum right now. Go. I'm not kidding. https://archiveofourown.org/series/549964

He had grown complacent. That was the problem. Not that he had ever been sodding Kevin McAllister when it came to the sanctity of his home. Dev’s flat was hardly his castle. It was a place to sleep, sometimes a place to eat, a place he tolerated but rarely enjoyed. It was just… a place.

The arrival of the Waynes changed that somewhat. He had visitors now—of the invited and uninvited varieties, but almost always welcome—and a home security system that consisted of more than a standard, landlord-installed deadbolt. The look of stunned disbelief on Wayne’s face when he had taken in the front lock had been almost funny. Less so was the genuine alarm from Alfred, who had been the first of the two to visit Dev’s flat and had been the one to call Wayne to begin with.

In addition to a now fully wired flat with a door built to withstand Killer Croc on a rampage and walls bristling with listening devices and sensors sensitive enough to track Dev’s resting heart rate, Wayne had also added vigilance training to Dev’s barely tolerated self-defense lessons. How to be constantly aware of one’s surroundings, how to check for intruders, how to recognize potential booby traps—it was exhausting, the paranoia. So Dev let it slip.

Also, in his own defense, he had just come off a double shift and could barely remember his own name. That would likely not be accepted as an excuse for why he had forgotten to activate the full system before _leaving_ for his shift, but the rest, at least, could be pushed off.

Dev swore to himself as he fumbled with his keys. The steady hands he had relied on for twenty-six hours and counting had vanished, leaving him picking through his key ring for the fob Wayne had left for him. That the fob was meant for the alarm system he hadn’t bothered to activate didn’t register, and his irritation had only grown by the time he located first the fob and then the brass key that unlocked his front door.

He wanted to drop his bag off on the mat, walk out of his own shoes, scrub the antiseptic hospital stink out of his hair, and collapse into bed for at least as long as he had already been awake. Dev shouldered open the door, shut it behind him, and dropped the key ring on the hook. Shower, bed. Shower, bed. Shower, bed. It was a chant that kept his feet moving all the way to the bathroom.

Dev’s socked feet had only just hit the tile when he was forced to reverse, carefully, deliberately, hands raised to avoid upsetting the man holding the knife to his throat.

“What the bloody hell.”

An exasperated inner voice that sounded suspiciously like Alfred warned that this chosen response, while understandable, was perhaps not the best path. Dev continued backward, the intruder following, until the back of his legs hit the low chair at the foot of his bed. He stopped, and his guest stopped as well, the tip of the butterfly knife hovering at Dev’s jugular like a wasp stinger.

The intruder was short, no more than 165 cm. For some reason that exasperated Dev, to be held at knifepoint by a shorter man. Not that the vertically challenged couldn’t be dangerous—look at little Damian or even Tim—but Dev had spent his life shying away from taller men. It seemed unfair to now be threatened by a wee one.

The issue with this particular man (other than the knife) was he had a look Dev recognized, even while sleep-deprived. The hunched shoulders, the emaciated frame, the sallow skin, the scabbed sores across the face, the jittering hand and dead eyes… Dev had seen it more than once, both on the streets of Gotham and in his hospital’s own emergency room.

Still, he was caught off-guard when the short man demanded not money for drugs, but actual drugs.

Again, “I beg your pardon?” was perhaps not the best response, but Dev had little to work with here.

“The drugs, man,” the wee one hissed, and Dev fought the temptation to ask if he had checked at the end of his rainbow. “I know you’re a doctor. You gotta have something here. Pills, a pad, whatever.”

“Look, mate, I don’t have anything here.” Also a bad answer, but the truth. “My wallet’s in the bag by the door. Take the cash, it’s fine.”

He’d be out a couple twenties and have to cancel whatever cards and IDs the bloke decided to swipe on his way out, but it was a loss Dev could stand to absorb. He just wanted this man out of his flat.

Wayne was going to give him such shit for this. Timothy, too. Mugged in his own flat because he forgot to click the little button on his way out.

Dev’s gaze skittered to his left. And forgot to lock his bedroom window, apparently.

_Such shit._

He was yanked back to the present by the prick of the knife against his throat. Dev bent backward, one hand flying behind to brace against the arm of the chair while the other remained raised. “Oi!”

“Don’t you lie to me, man. You think I’m stupid? You think I’m playing around?”

Spittle flecked on Dev’s cheek, making him grimace. Definitely in need of a shower now.

_Sodding shite, man, focus!_

It was ridiculous. He was standing in an flat rigged to high heaven by the bloody Batman and he couldn’t even signal for help because he had harangued Wayne into raising the sensitivity level for shouts after one too many gaming-based false alarms.

His reaction time was off, another thing Wayne would chide him for. The blade flashed, slicing through the meat of his cheek, and Dev could do nothing but yelp in pain and slap his hand over the wound.

“I AM NOT. FUCKING. PLAYING AROUND.” the man snarled.

Dev’s brain offered no further witty comebacks. There was a high-pitched whine rattling in his skull like a mosquito knocking against the window screen. He could feel the blood welling warm and thick beneath his palm, the pain not yet arriving beneath the shock but on its way. He blinked, unable to focus beyond the tip of the knife now glistening with his blood.

The whine solidified into words. _Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out._

Down in the street below, glass smashed and a car alarm blared. The man’s shorn head whipped towards the sound, the tendons in his emaciated neck popping like cords. Dev exploded into motion.

_Block!_ the Wayne in his head barked as he brought his forearm down against the man’s knife arm. _Kick!_ brought his knee up into his opponent’s stomach, and then Dev was off, sliding across the wood flooring as he sprinted for the door.

It felt like a nightmare, one of those horrible dreams where everything slowed and a dash felt like running through quicksand. He couldn’t gather the breath to shout for help, and the monster was on his heels.

A mass, rigid and weighted, slammed into his back. Dev stumbled forward and fell with a cry, head slamming into the cold, unyielding front of his icebox. Around him, his photos and magnets fell with a clatter among the shattered pieces of a stool. Shooting stars flamed in front of his eyes.

The intruder looked much taller now. He stood over Dev, eclipsing the lone lightbulb Dev had flipped on when entering, the knife gleaming in a white-knuckled fist.

“_I AM GOING TO GUT YOU LIKE A FUCKING FISH!_” The screech rang out in the small space.

Dev threw up his arm, for what little it would do him. It had never been much effective before.

It was over so quickly. The living room window shattered inward. A shadow flooded the room. There was a bellow and a cry from two different mouths. The clatter of metal against the kitchen tile. The crunch of armor-enforced bone against bone. The man was gone and the shadow was looming overhead.

“Are you al—“

Dev’s hand closed around a magnet on the floor next to him and hurled it at the new intruder. He let out a gasping laugh of despair as it flew wide. The shadow plucked the magnet from the air, then looked down at the plastic Bat symbol resting in its glove.

“Did you just try to batarang me… with me?” the shadow asked.

_Wayne_.

Dev covered his eyes with his hand. It wasn’t that he was opposed to crying in front of Batman on principle. This was hardly the first time. But there was very little about the evening Dev felt he could control, and whether or not saline leaked from his eyes was, at least in theory, something he could choose for himself.

Batman made a low noise that sounded like a grumble, one Dev had come to realize meant something like distress. Wayne had used it only yesterday to fuss over a dog-eared page Tim had left in his copy of _Treasure Island_. There was something perversely comforting about being placed on the same level as a bent piece of paper.

“How did you know?” Dev asked before Wayne could speak. He dropped his hand, eyes wet but skin dry. “Get bloody bat tingles when I’m in danger now?”

He wouldn’t put it past Wayne to develop a power like that. With children like his, he certainly needed it, and despite a stack of detailed medical files to the contrary, Dev still had trouble believing Wayne didn’t have a superpower or two tucked away in his cape and cowl.

“I was already on my way over.” Batman had taken a step back so he no longer loomed between Dev and the light. He still looked menacing. “Agent A suggested I stop in, check in after your double. Then your heart rate set off the sensor.”

Batman would have received the alarm in the Batmobile and switched the passive listening devices to active. He would’ve heard the fight, most likely. Dev’s upper lip twisted. _Fight_ might be overly generous.

“Are you hurt?”

Dev squinted up. Batman waited patient and still. Dev shook his head and hid the wince the movement provoked.

“Just the face.”

The cowl bobbed once, then hesitated uncharacteristically. Giving Dev and the chaos around him a wide berth, Batman retrieved a clean hand towel from the drawer next to the stove and handed it to Dev. 

“Pressure,” he instructed, and then, “Will you be alright on your own for a bit?”

Batman gestured at the prone, zip-tied body of the man. He looked wee again, lying on the floor like a desiccated spider’s husk. Dev still had to fight back a shudder.

“Go,” he said, waving toward the door. “Take him. I’ll be fine.”

The opaque lenses eyed him steadily for a moment more, then Batman turned away. He looked about until he spotted Dev’s bag by the door and rifled through the pockets until he found the mobile. After a quick dial and a few murmured words, he passed the device to Dev.

“I’ll be back,” he promised. He and his unconscious load were gone by the time Dev lifted the mobile to his ear.

“Hullo?”

“Hello, Kiran.” _Alfred._ “I hear you’ve had quite the night.”

Dev closed his eyes and rested his head back against the icebox. “Oh. You know. A bit of this and a bit of that. I’m fine.”

“I’m certain you are,” Alfred agreed in a tone that said he knew no such thing. “Master Bruce has some business to attend to, but then he’ll be stopping by. In the meantime, have you any injuries?”

“Nothing fatal.” It was meant as a joke, but Dev felt the tremor run through him. “A bit of a knocked head and a cut on my face.”

The cut was beginning to make itself known beneath the towel now. It bit deep, pain swelling with every heartbeat and each twitch of his mouth. It felt like more than a cut, suddenly, and Dev was hit with the horror of having to look at it. He wondered if Alfred would just let him stand and go to bed.

“Best get that tended to, then,” Alfred was already saying, “if you think you can stand safely.”

“Alfred, I’m alright,” Dev protested and thought he did a decent job of sounding it, all evidence to the contrary. “You needn’t stay on the line. I’ve just spent a double at hospital and I’m shattered. All I need is a good night’s rest.”

“Humor an old man who finds the idea of you alone in that flat to be distasteful.”

Dev opened his mouth to argue, then imagined hanging up and walking back into his bathroom alone. He closed his mouth.

He was still sitting on the floor of his kitchen when Wayne returned. Alfred had warned him, so he hadn’t been startled by the rattle of the doorknob or the sight of Bruce Wayne in sweats in the doorway.

“Alfie says hullo,” Dev croaked, though the mobile now lay quiet and dark in the hand in his lap. The other hand still pressed the towel to his face.

Wayne shut the door, then crossed the space between the door and Dev to crouch just out of arm’s reach. “May I help you up?”

“If you flip that switch by the door, the lighting’s alright.”

Wayne nodded and backed away. The indicated switch flooded the kitchen and entryway with light, providing more than enough to see by as Wayne returned with the first aid kit from the bathroom. Dev had closed his eyes against the sudden brightness, but he opened them again, the corner of his mouth twitching at the unexpected sight of Bruce Wayne lowering himself to sit crisscross-applesauce next to him.

“Knees,” Wayne muttered at the look. Must have been a harder-than-normal night if kneeling wasn’t an option.

One of those knees rested against Dev’s thigh as Wayne leaned forward to remove the towel. The warmth of it was grounding and Dev shivered as a piece of him came back to himself.

Wayne kept his gaze on the wound rather than on Dev, a focused frown marring his brow. “It’s alright if you need to cry.”

Dev harrumphed in surprise.

“What.” Wayne’s tone was flat and goading like a stick. “You were attacked in your home. You’re tired. You’re bleeding. A good cry isn’t unwarranted.”

“Oh leave off,” Dev sighed.

Wayne’s dark gaze flicked to meet Dev’s and then back down to the knife wound. “So crying is good enough for me and not you.”

“You look like Damian grown when you make that face,” Dev warned.

“I’m not making a face.” It was true now that Wayne’s mien was wiped clean as Alfred’s counters.

“You were. You were making the face he makes when he thinks he’s manufactured himself a loophole.” Dev closed his eyes again and muttered, “You lot and your faces.”

Sod secret identities, it was those faces that they wore the masks for. Who would be scared of Batman if they knew he could look like a cat licking cream? Smug bastard.

Dev startled and hissed as the wet wipe touched his skin.

“Sorry,” Wayne apologized, though he needn’t have. Dev knew that the first step in care would be removing the blood and cleaning the wound, but he hadn’t been paying attention.

“I… _am_ sorry,” Wayne repeated after a pause. Dev cracked open one eye to a slit and crooked a brow. “For not being here.”

Dev rolled his eye and let it slide shut again. “You Waynes and your collective god complex. It’s my fault for not alarming the damn system.”

“Yes,” Wayne agree, making Dev crack his eye open again, “it is. But if I had picked you up from the hospital like I had planned, none of this would have happened.”

At Dev’s look, Wayne’s shoulders rose in a small shrug. “Alfred was worried about you driving home tired.”

Alfred was worried, which meant Wayne had been worried as well. Enough to at least consider coming by to chauffeur him safely home. Dev couldn’t remember anyone doing that for him before.

“So you would have dropped me here and stopped nothing. _You_ wouldn’t have been able to stop a thing, Wayne.” Batman could. Batman did. Bruce Wayne would have been just as helpless as Dev.

Wayne had no retort for that.

The comedown from a surge of adrenaline was a hell of a thing. Dev felt like he’d been cleaned out from head to heel and left with nothing but a swarm of bees and their nest of live wires in his chest.

His cheek had been cleaned and numbed, the first of the stitches just going in when he croaked, “Wayne.”

The pressure against his leg was gone in an instant and Dev was scrambling up onto his hands and knees. He had only made it a short scramble before Wayne met him and shoved the under-sink rubbish bin below his chin.

Dev retched, bidding a woeful farewell to the microwave burrito that had been his only food in the last eight hours. The muscles in his cheek pulled against the gash and the half-done stitches, and he moaned.

He spat, then sat back again, this time against a warm brick wall of human instead of the cold metal door of the icebox. Dev sniffled and wiped a line of snot down his wrist, then sniffled again when he noticed the blood on his hand.

Wayne shifted the bin aside, then pulled a wet wipe from the kit. He cleaned Dev’s hand the way one might a toddler’s after a hard meal, rubbing between the fingers and picking underneath the nails. Dev was relieved to watch red be replaced with familiar, healthy brown. It wasn’t that he was unnerved by the sight of blood on his hands—unfortunately, the sight had become all too common is his life—but the sight of his own blood, that… That was less common and had too many thoughts and memories bound to it.

“You’re alright,” Wayne said in a voice low enough to make his chest rumble against Dev’s back. It was a little like leaning against a tiger. “You’ve had a scare, but you’re alright.”

The rusted wipe arced through the air and into the bin with a wet splat. Dev’s fingers shook as he wrapped them around Wayne’s hand and squeezed. “Bloody brilliant, you are.”

Wayne smacked a kiss against Dev’s temple and rumbled, “Yes. Hand me the kit.”

Once Dev’s cheek was sewn back together, slathered in petroleum jelly, and covered, Wayne helped Dev to his feet. The hand on Dev’s elbow remained even once he had stopped swaying and guided him toward the bedroom as Dev gave a jaw-cracking yawn.

“I’m going to sleep on your couch,” Wayne announced, then raised his voice slightly to continue over Dev’s protestations. “And then tomorrow, I’m going to reconfigure the alarm. It will activate automatically any time you leave. No more forgetting.”

“I won’t remember to bring the fob,” Dev warned, just on the edge of plaintive. “I’ll lock myself out constantly. You’ll get one of those bloody alerts every single day.”

“Then I’ll get one every single day. And I’ll come check on you every single day.” Bruce nudged Dev into the room, then released his elbow to rifle through the dresser drawers. He picked a pajama set off the top and placed them on the bed.

Dev hesitated and looked to the still-open window. Bruce’s mouth pressed into a flat line. “We’ll do something about that as well. You have the couch tonight, I’ll take the floor.”

Perhaps Wayne’s hidden powers were of the mind control variety, for Dev soon found himself changed and scuffling over to his already-prepared sofa.

“The floor’s too hard,” he tried one last time. “Just go home, Wayne. I’ll be fine.”

“Softer than a cave floor,” Bruce said as he lay down on his own pallet. “You’ve already set off the heart rate monitor six times since I’ve been here, and if I went home now, Alfred would just send me back. Go to sleep, Kiran.”

Dev collapsed back onto the sofa with a quiet groan as the cushion cradled his aching spine. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would shower and eat again. Tonight, he would rest.

There was a hand in Dev’s, broad and calloused and strong. Dev held it while he slept.

**Author's Note:**

> To note on the intruder's height, Dev is a Tall Stringbean Boy, so no shade on shorter dudes. He's just very tall and very tired and very Done.
> 
> Also, yes, that was a Spiderman joke. No, I refuse to use the hyphen.
> 
> Thanks to Audrey for letting me borrow Dev and unknowingly acting as my sounding board while I wrote this fic in secret. And for unwittingly creating Dev's Batman magnet.
> 
> Again, can't stress this enough, go read CEC. If you like my stuff, this series is the reason my stuff exists. I didn't even READ fanfic before CEC. So, like, go. https://archiveofourown.org/series/549964


End file.
